Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The construction of exclusionary identities usually does not start in the legal field. Though it may also happen through law, often it is in the educational spaces where it is sown and from there it later flows to political levels. At those levels it becomes institutionalized and subsequently affects the legal system, either directly or indirectly, eliminating factually the efficiency of certain dispositions and rules. There are many difficulties and problems of all kinds that, each day with greater intensity, have a negative impact on the effective deployment of human rights. From the wide and diffuse space that we conventionally identify as “culture” to the accelerated economic universe of “globalization,” without forgetting factors such as religious fanaticism, new forms of violence, or the depraved use of new technologies, an entire arsenal of cultural, political, and economic elements successfully conspire against the universality and effectiveness of recognized, solemnly proclaimed and, in many cases, normatively formalized human rights. The recognition of the “sovereign state” as the central subject of international law, even assuming its juridical, democratic, and constitutional legitimacy, has not managed to completely neutralize the tendencies of political power to the exclusionary identity building and the collective self-assertion of particularisms. Therein lies, in Jürgen Habermas’s opinion, “the realist sting that sticks to the flesh of human rights.” It is true that the political role of the national State is not in question, but perhaps the time has come to accelerate the search for other political actors with more capacity for action and more effectiveness in guaranteeing and protecting human rights.